The Pentagon is battling the clock to fix serious, unreported F-35 problems

https://www.defensenews.com/air/2019/06/12/the-pentagon-is-battling-the-clock-to-fix-serious-unreported-f-35-problems/

by smacktoward • 7 years ago

201 372 7 years ago

defensenews.com

simonblack• 7 years ago

Brewster Buffalo II.

Sounds good on paper, disaster in practice.

wpasc• 7 years ago

If the military-industrial voting complex (defense companies geographically spreading manufacturing operations over key swing congressional districts), I believe more can be done than most think. I believe their key influence is what props up US military spending that the pentagon does NOT want [1].

[1] https://www.military.com/daily-news/2015/01/28/pentagon-tell...

DSingularity• 7 years ago

if what?

stupidcar• 7 years ago

Lots of countries burn money on labor and goods they don't need, they just call it "socialism" instead of "defence". The US might be better off of they acknowledged that the fruits of this particular labor weren't going anywhere real.

h0l0cube• 7 years ago

Lots of countries burn money on labor and goods they don't need, they just call it "socialism" instead of "defence"

I suppose in your eyes, 'need' is a loaded term. Maslow's hierarchy of needs, while subject to some debate, has become a popular consensus on what the term means. Many socialist policies are in favor of universal health-care, food and housing programs etc. which sit at the foundation of the hierarchy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs

SomeOldThrow• 7 years ago

Lots of countries burn money on labor and goods they don't need, they just call it "socialism" instead of "defence"

Got any examples?

r00fus2• 7 years ago

Turning that on its head, is “defense” (a euphemism used to justify wars) really worth it compared to better healthcare and bridges that don’t fall apart?

Havoc• 7 years ago

controlled flight into terrain

Uhm what? Presumably no pilot will fly into terrain if in control.

That whole thing just reads like a nightmare project

ajross• 7 years ago

"Controlled flight into terrain" is a euphemism (one of several) for "pilot error". It's a term of art in the aviation safety industry for "the aircraft didn't break, it wasn't in an unsafe state like a dive or spin, the pilot just flew it into the ground".

In this case, though, it seems to be used incorrectly because it's being applied to a problem that causes the aircraft to be difficult to control. A plane that is too hard to fly isn't the pilot's mistake.

jussij• 7 years ago

Presumably no pilot will fly into terrain if in control.

The history of flight has many instance where this has happened.

A very common cause is bad visibility mixed in with mountainous terrain.

manicdee• 7 years ago

Controlled flight into terrain can cover incidents such as flying in limited visibility using instruments where the instruments aren’t wrong, the pilot is conscious and in control, but gets task focussed or misinterprets a signal and takes deliberate action that ends up in an unplanned lithobraking event.

Flying limited visibility or with horizon obscured is a typical scenario for controlled flight into ground. Some pilots will also feel less confident with a particular implementation of the artificial horizon.

Then there are transition states between particular instrument assisted flight modes (“autopilot”) and manual flight modes, as well as assisted flight modes where the pilot and the computers disagree on the appropriate course of action (similar to, say, automatic trim of horizontal stabiliser in aircraft with engines slung under the wing). The pilot might switch modes and assume control over pitch and yaw but the computer was handing over control of throttle. So the pilot ends up fighting the computer for control rather than actually flying the aircraft.

Labelling it “pilot error” can cause investigators to stop looking for the root cause. “Controlled flight into ground” leads to the question “why would an otherwise competent pilot do what this pilot did?”

GVIrish8• 7 years ago

Controlled flight into terrain used to be one of the leading causes of aviation accidents. All it took was for the pilot(s) to get disoriented, distracted, or make a bad miscalculation, particularly at night or in cloudy weather.

Ground warning sensors and training are better now so there's less of it, but you still get it from time to time.

scanny2• 7 years ago

Isn't this sort of thing expected through the process of developing cutting edge hardware and software?

I can't imagine there are many airframes that are pushing the technological boundaries as the F-35, aren't bleeding edge products prone to difficult development?

I don't see how this wont be worth it in the long run in terms of getting ahead in an arms race as a superpower.

It seems as though this is probably the hardest thing to get industry insight into given the secret nature of it all.

JshWright• 7 years ago

The F-35 isn't that "bleeding edge" though. Most of the "innovation" comes from trying to accomplish a bunch of different roles with a single aircraft (shockingly, this has resulted in a plane that excels at none of them).

Klathmon• 7 years ago

But would the alternative of designing and manufacturing many different aircraft be cheaper? And would it be as effective?

For it's faults, the F-35 is a weapon that can be configured and deployed at the drop of a hat for just about anything. That's a very powerful capability to have as a defensive and offensive weapon.

jjoonathan4• 7 years ago

So VR helmets, EW antennas embedded in stealth skin, and crazy combat networking are all trivial features that we should expect a gaggle of government contractors to get right on the first pass? I'm not sure I buy that argument. The plane looks plenty fancy to me, at least in the context of its alternatives ("first lol" tech demonstrators don't count).

scanny2• 7 years ago

I mean having a look around at some of the technical innovation in this space seems to show that there are many firsts happening with the airframe.

https://www.wired.com/2016/06/course-f-35-comes-400000-augme...

They may not be firsts overall, but it seems like a pretty complicated environment to perform testing and development in.

I have to wonder what getting a software build out for a fighter jet must be like, and getting someone up in the air in different environments to test it must make the testing process daunting.

cheschire2• 7 years ago

I suspect most of the innovation is actually in the acquisitions side of the house. They could burn money for decades on this project and still come out ahead compared to running half a dozen acquisitions projects for multiple planes.

ekianjo2• 7 years ago

This kind of planes are not what is needed to be a superpower nowadays. The landscape of military confrontation has completely changed.

jjoonathan4• 7 years ago

Easy to say, impossible to act on.

While we're in a speculative mood, just what kind of planes do you think are needed to be a superpower nowadays? Seems to me that a plausible answer is drones, lots of drones, and missiles, with a EW / networking / stealth focused plane to forward-position a human to coordinate them. The F-35 seems to fit that role like a glove.

ICBMs are another potential answer but I have a hard time being angry at war toys that provide intermediate options between "peace" and "destroy the world."

mysterydip4• 7 years ago

The defense acquisition process is supposed to allow for production of bleeding edge development efforts while minimizing risk and meeting requirements, on budget and on schedule. In theory, anyway.

The main problem to me is the F-35 is three airframes with three different sets of (competing) requirements, trying to save cost by keeping as much similar between them as possible. I don't know in the end if we would have just been better off with three purpose-built aircraft.

icelancer2• 7 years ago

> I don't know in the end if we would have just been better off with three purpose-built aircraft.

We've tried this in the past and failed to control costs spectacularly. The JSF/F-35 project is an insane boondoggle but it seems unlikely that the alternative of splitting them out would have been better.

We all know what should have been done by this point, which is... not the JSF. But we're pretty far down this road and we do need to modernize the current air superiority weapons we have, so... eh. It looks like we're stuck.

jandrewrogers• 7 years ago

The F-35 really isn't cutting edge. It is in many regards a nerf-ed export-ready version of the F-22 tech, which everyone wants but no one gets, and designed to be a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none type platform.

There is definitely a "targeting the down market" aspect to the productization.

jdietrich4• 7 years ago

Isn't this sort of thing expected through the process of developing cutting edge hardware and software?

To a great extent, that's the fundamental problem with the F-35 program - it's a technological showcase first and a useful weapons system second. It has been designed and commissioned by people who believe that "most advanced" necessarily means "best" and who are indifferent to the actual tactical and strategic requirements.

The Army and Marines have been crying out for years for a suitable replacement for the ageing A-10. It's the finest close support aircraft ever made, it has a legendary reputation among infantrymen who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, but the USAF are still planning on retiring it in favour of the F-35, an aircraft that is simply incapable of performing the same role. Even if the F-35 were inarguably an excellent aircraft, it's the wrong aircraft for a vitally important job.

The F-35 helmet is a $400,000 showcase of AR technology, capable of providing unprecedented levels of data to a pilot. It's also really bad at being a helmet - it's so heavy that it could literally break the neck of smaller pilots during ejection and so bulky that it limits visibility. Test pilots have mixed views on the usefulness of the AR cameras, but they all want the ability to look over their shoulder. It's maybe possibly better at doing a thing that nobody asked for, but it's demonstrably worse at being a helmet.

Servicemen don't want cutting-edge innovation - they want weapons systems that work reliably in the field and provide useful combat capabilities. That's what you need to keep in mind when you hear the DoD hype the F-35. We know it's a hell of a lot less reliable than existing US aircraft and competing foreign aircraft. We know that the one-airframe-to-rule-them-all model is deeply flawed and leaves serious gaps in the combat capability of the US military. What does the F-35 actually offer in the field that couldn't be provided by a cheaper, simpler, more reliable weapons system? I've yet to hear a good answer to that question.

joering22• 7 years ago

It's also really bad at being a helmet

A buddy of mine is actually flying the jet. He said helmet is cool to wear first time but quickly wears out in real flies and is even worse in combat. A lieutenant that first flew it many years ago called it "karate mirror"; he explained it must have been designed by someone who never fought a fight, but somewhat was stubborn enough to assume when you fight karate you would love to have a back mirror to see whats happening behind.

They military argues with contractors atm to actually come back to a regular helmet, because there is really no added value in flying Mach 1 and engage in fight in front of you and having ability to see behind or even under, when you have all sort of warning systems that monitors your surrounding and allows you enough time to alter your direction before you get hit.

stouset7• 7 years ago

Look, I love the A-10C. It’s a wonderful plane. I’ve flown it for years in sims as part of a realism-based squadron. And I too am sad that such an iconic plane is being put to pasture.

But it’s beyond time for this meme to die.

The A-10C just isn’t suitable for this task any more. Low and slow just doesn’t cut it. It’s slow to respond due to a cruise speed of 200-220KIAS (compared to 550-575KIAS for an F-15E). Having to get to within 1.0–1.2nm to employ the famed GAU-8/A Avenger (or rockets) makes it a MANPAD and AAA magnet. The gun is limited in the types of targets it’s effective against nowadays as well. And if you aren’t using the gun or rockets, you’re dropping JDAMs (GPS and laser-guided bombs) or firing air-to-ground missiles like Mavericks. If you’re using these, you’d rather do so high and fast: you get both increased effective range and more forgiving margins of error during weapon release.

And if you’re doing this, you might as well just put them on an F-15E which outclasses the A-10C in terms of carrying capacity, response time, survivability (unsurprisingly, not getting hit because you’re at 600KIAS at 30,000ft is better than surviving being hit because you were flying 250KIAS at 500ft), weapons availability, and virtually any other trait you can imagine other than “loiter time”.

And response time trumps loiter time hands-down, especially when loitering dramatically increases the odds of losing the pilot and/or airframe to surface fire. On top of this, if you're in permissive airspace there's always a tanker nearby to extend your ability to loiter (and if you're not in permissive airspace, your A-10C fleet is grounded anyway).

The A-10C is lauded, and rightfully so, because it was such an effective CAS platform. But it’s not any more. All of the praise you hear about it it real and deserved, but comes from the perspective of people who saw it in action because that’s the plane that filled the role and so that’s the plane they saw in action. With other planes now filling that role, you will hear the similar praise about those planes for pretty much the same reason. The people who aren’t singing its praises are the commanders who see the frightening number of lost or damaged airframes and see how poorly it stacks up against other planes readily available in our fleet.

Edit: And I have to respond to this point.

We know it's a hell of a lot less reliable than existing US aircraft and competing foreign aircraft.

The F-35 is literally one of the most reliable aircraft we have ever flown (second only to the F-22). Since 2006 (thirteen years), we've had four losses. For the F-22, it's four losses in twenty-two years. The F-15? 46 were lost from 1972–1985. And nearly twenty-five percent of our F-14 fleet has been lost in non-combat accidents.

j9461701• 7 years ago

It has been designed and commissioned by people who believe that "most advanced" necessarily means "best" and who are indifferent to the actual tactical and strategic requirements.

They said the exact same thing about the F-15. And the F-18. Both of which went on to spectacular success - the F-15 in particular has never once been bested in air to air combat, while claiming 105 enemy kills (including MiG-29s). It's able to do that due to its big sexy radar and complicated electronics and all the other techno-gadgets that people like Pierre Sprey decried every step of the way because he still thinks we live in 1967.

On the ground, there is less room for innovation. Guns are a mature technology. The primary concern in 2019 are things like reliability and cost, because the difference between an AK47 and an M16 is not that big. They both shoot bullets, they both are capable of full-auto, they both are light. To the soldier holding them, big difference of course - but from the 10,000 mile perspective they're basically doing the same job in the same way. It doesn't make much difference if I'm a general planning strategies whether my rifleman are holding M4s or M16s or AK47s.

Air combat is different, technology is still radically changing things every generation. And if you're caught a generation behind it's hard to make a fight of it. We have jet engines, and our enemies don't. We have solid state avionics, our enemies don't. We have AESA radar, our enemies don't. And now? We have all those advanced technologies in the F-35, like production line stealth, that no other peer enemy yet has deployed on the field. Certainly technology is not everything, you also need training, tactics, support systems. But it is undeniably a massive advantage, and one that's worth a little teething to get.

The Army and Marines have been crying out for years for a suitable replacement for the ageing A-10. It's the finest close support aircraft ever made, it has a legendary reputation among infantrymen who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, but the USAF are still planning on retiring it in favour of the F-35, an aircraft that is simply incapable of performing the same role. Even if the F-35 were inarguably an excellent aircraft, it's the wrong aircraft for a vitally important job.

The A-10 is a really awful CAS platform. It's ungodly slow and so takes forever to get on station, the cannon is horrendously inaccurate, it's got a low mission capability rating and the entire concept of its design (low-flying ruggedness) was rendered obsolete with the invention of the manpad. I mean this is the platform that flew the least number of CAS missions of any capable airframe in Iraq 2, yet had the highest number of friendly fire incidents in absolute terms. If you're curious how, the cannon. All the other platforms are using fancy sensors and PGMs, while the A-10 is often going on gun runs with the Mk-1 human eye. The A-10's only two numerical advantages are loiter time and cost per flight hour, but drones exist now so it doesn't even have those unique positives anymore.

The fact that soldiers love the A-10 is meaningless - sailors loved battleships too, even after they were turned into big metal deathtraps by airplanes. The troops just really like giant cannons, even when they're not actually useful anymore.

Servicemen don't want cutting-edge innovation - they want weapons systems that work reliably in the field and provide useful combat capabilities.

Soviet jets could handle pebbles being blown into their air in takes. They could handle smacking down onto the tarmarc at a velocity that would cripple any modern American jet. They could be nearly shaken apart, but were just built so robustly they'd still make it home. Comparatively American jets were fragile prima donnas who needed huge amounts of maintenance and could only be flown on the most pristine of air fields.

But once they were in the air? USAF planes showed exactly why all that TLC were more than worth it. I'd rather be sitting in an F-15 than any Soviet fighter ever put in the sky. At the risk of repeating myself, the ground pounder ideology of "rugged, reliable, lowest-possible-tech" is suicide in the air. In the air, technology advantages still play a huge role and so suffering a low mission capability rating is quite possibly worth it if you get a massive return on power (within reason of course).

icelancer2• 7 years ago

Generally speaking your post is true, but as others have pointed out, the A-10 is rapidly becoming an unviable CAS platform due to MANPADS and other improvements in anti-air support.

What the others didn't really point out is that the F-35 is definitely capable of what the A-10 does and more. It is faster, brings a drone-like attack platform, and can engage from much higher altitudes.

And this is coming from someone (see my other comments) that doesn't particularly care for the JSF/F-35. The A-10 needs to go away, and the F-35 will be a more than capable replacement for it.

Now, the other F-35 roles...

nradov4• 7 years ago

Times have changed. The B-1B is now generally regarded as the finest close air support aircraft ever made. Compared to the A-10C, the B-1B can get on station faster, loiter longer, carry more precision weapons, and has better sensors and communications.

zipwitch2• 7 years ago

What does the F-35 actually offer in the field that couldn't be provided by a cheaper, simpler, more reliable weapons system?

It offers Lockheed Martin one-point-five trillion dollars, much of which will be spent in key Congressional districts.

That's all.

I suspect that those responsible for making decisions about the F-35 are perfectly fine with this. Rhetoric aside, our government and military appear to think they exist in a world where direct Great Power military conflict is not a possibility. The F-35 seems perfectly adequate to swiftly wreck anywhere on Earth that is not Europe, China, Japan, Russia or India. And that seems to be our actual goal in terms of capabilities for the immediate future.

scotty796• 7 years ago

... suitable replacement for the ageing A-10. It's the finest close support aircraft ever made ...

I'm actually quite happy that they are focusing on theoretical weapon F35, not a practical upgrade to a practical weapon.

I'm hoping theoretical weapon will be used less. I think modern weaponary is so muderous that we should be focusing more on its role as a deterrent (in which being hyperadvanced might help) not the practical aspects (how efficiently it helps people to kill people when in use).

myrandomcomment• 7 years ago

Having been on the receiving end of of an A-10 fire support mission more than once, I can speak for the effectiveness of the job they do. Their time on on target is the key to their effectiveness. They are flying tanks. I do not really care the politics of the the replacement, just that the replacement is just as effective. Lives depend on this. It should not be a pissing contest between political views but what just works. As a former grunt I just want my ass saved.

nnq• 7 years ago

The US army is not lacking in capability... you have an excess of it!

What you'll earn by having this probably-prototype put into production is tons of valuable data about what works in production, what to improve, what components fails first, how that single-airframe stuff can be made cheaper and more reliable etc. Based on this data nobody else will have, engineers will be able to design weapon systems (think even ML-asysted design based of v2.0 based on telemetric data gathered over decades etc.) nobody else will be able to compete with even if F-35 is a flop. I imagine this is why people fret about the Turkey thing, all this is about the data (that you wouldn't want Russian systems to get a copy of) not about the flying brick.

Overall, putting boring reliable tech in production does not generate much useful data. Putting unreliable prototypes does. And it's all about techno-military supremacy long-term game here, not losing or winning one little war in a country you don't care about.

Now about the pilots and soldiers... yeah, you're doing R&D in "production" (where "production" == "warfare" here), (the wrong) people will be killed, there will be a blood price paid for all this technological advancement, but in the end you'll benefit from it.

...only thing I find slightly horrifying is that this mindset (of "screw the 'client', let'd do some R&D in production to get unique insights and special competitive advantage from it" - that has already sipped into commercial hardware and software for a long time btw), creates an incentive to "gather more and better data" and when this translate to "wage more war" it doesn't bode well...

afpx2• 7 years ago

This is a useful perspective. Thanks. I have some colleagues who work in training at DoD. We often discuss how weapon systems (and training) could be vastly improved if well-defined use cases, requirements, and experience design were sketched out before weapon systems were sent to Congress for procurement. Unfortunately, oftentimes these bills are bloated with ‘advanced technology’ so that the contractor pie is split across enough districts to get a budget line item.

arisAlexis• 7 years ago

maybe the high level army hierarchy is expecting different war conditions than the Army and the Marines. Much in the like of drones, killing robot machines, remote lasers etc.

shitgoose• 7 years ago

building a bloated, overpriced product that solves world's problems, but cannot accomplish a simple task it was meant for - so it is not just in the software world, eh?

alexhutcheson3• 7 years ago

What does the F-35 actually offer in the field that couldn't be provided by a cheaper, simpler, more reliable weapons system? I've yet to hear a good answer to that question.

I think this line of criticism stems from confusing two mission types which are superficially similar, but actually have very different requirements:

- Attack missions like Close Air Support involve hitting enemy tactical targets on or near the battlefield. In recent conflicts the US has been involved in, these have mostly been in very permissive environments (limited defenses except MANPADs). This is the mission most people are thinking of when they talk about how great the A-10 is, or suggest buying the A-29.

- Strike missions involve hitting targets that might be deep behind enemy lines, protected by multiple layers of radar, air defenses, etc. This is much more difficult to do, and is getting harder as radar, fighter aircraft, and AA missiles improve. Doing it successfully against even a moderately equipped enemy requires aircraft with higher-end and more specialized capabilities than you would need for typical "Attack" roles.

You might notice that Strike is the second word in Joint Strike Fighter. That's not a coincidence - the strike capability is the major distinguishing feature of the aircraft, and what drives a lot of its requirements (stealth, decoys, etc.) The fact that it can also do a decent job at Attack missions is a bonus, but the US has a lot of F-15s, F-16s, and F-18s who can also handle that role in a permissive environment for the foreseeable future.

This blog post explains the distinction in more detail than I'd be able to: https://www.navalgazing.net/Strike-Warfare

projectileboy• 7 years ago

If you were to try to write an allegory of a superpower in decline, you could hardly do better than tell the story of the F-35. The most expensive weapons program in the history of the world, a decade overdue, still plagued with showstopping problems, loaded with features no one asked for, packaged in a compromised design that makes it not quite what any of the service branches actually need, with specs that do not favorably match up to the F-4. At best, we could say it was a jobs program that taught us how not to design and manufacture military aircraft in the future. The price we’ll pay for that knowledge is $1.5 trillion, along with two or three decades of air inferiority.

wazoox3• 7 years ago

The billions poured into useless military projects is unfortunately the US way to do social spending...

alkonaut3• 7 years ago

If you were to try to write an allegory of a superpower in decline, you could hardly do better than tell the story of the F-35.

The Russian Su-57 is plagued with the same kind of issues, made much worse by the fact that Russia is no longer the superpower it was. The difference between the US and a superpower in actual decline is that the US can throw almost unlimited funds at the F-35 program and Russia can't. The real mark of a superpower isn't that it makes clever things but that it can afford making stupid things.

cm2187• 7 years ago

That would make sense at the prototype and testing phase but I understand they delivered something like 400 aircrafts already.

GVIrish8• 7 years ago

That is the result of the brilliant idea of "concurrent development", where they start producing aircraft for delivery before the testing and validation phase is done. The idea was that computer modeling would obviate the need for extensive real world testing and that the time and cost savings would justify the approach. And of course, another facet of it is that it makes the whole program more difficult to cancel.

The result has been expensive retrofits to the fleet as more and more defects have been found.

varjag• 7 years ago

You can tell how good F-35 just by amount of effort Sputnik News dedicates to report anything negative about it.

nabla9• 7 years ago

F-35 development started in 1992. First flight of X-35 was 19 years ago. First flight of F-35 was 13 years ago. It's still fighting with problems and not ready.

Meantime military technology and requirements evolve constantly. They don't wait for F-35 to be ready.

Analemma_• 7 years ago

One point five trillion dollars.

m0zg2• 7 years ago

Timing is impeccable: Trump is about to sell a bunch of F-35's to Poland, so let's hit them with a "cluster of damning reports" to sour the deal.

If you read the actual article, you'll see that most problems are either fixed already or aren't as severe the headline would make you believe. But nobody really reads the articles.

jayashe• 7 years ago

they made a loud-as-hell flyover of DC today in celebration

josefresco• 7 years ago

In your scenario, who is behind the "cluster of damning reports"? Liberals? Poland? Russia? China? Defense contractor competitors? I agree with the second part of your comment.

m0zg2• 7 years ago

Could be anyone. Could even be several parties simultaneously feeding information to the media. The only unlikely party is the competitors, since it's not in their interest (in this case) to shit on Lockheed.

rlt• 7 years ago

What are the chances all of the negative press the F-35 has gotten is disinformation designed to mislead adversaries?

jSully24• 7 years ago

Zero.

colechristensen4• 7 years ago

Most of it is fanboys or anti-fanboys.

You'd think people in software would be more familiar with having defects in your product not meaning doom or incompetence.

zipwitch2• 7 years ago

I hardly think the Office of the Director, Operational Test & Evaluation counts as an "anti-fanboy". And their reviews of F-35 progress of been the bureaucratic equivalent of damning.

Full report here: https://www.dote.osd.mil/pub/reports/FY2018/pdf/dod/2018f35j...

Article summarizing it here: https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/dote-delivers-ano...

mrguyorama2• 7 years ago

If my product fucks up, someone can't buy something on the internet

If the F35 fucks up, people can die, international relations can be harmed, etc etc etc

GVIrish8• 7 years ago

Very unlikely. Ideally you want your adversaries to be so afraid of how capable your new weapons system is that it acts as a strong deterrent.

Not only that, but a large component of the Joint Strike Fighter program was selling it to allied militaries. It would be silly to trash the aircraft publicly if you want a dozen other nations to buy it.

decoyworker2• 7 years ago

The easiest way to defeat the aircraft is to cancel the program. I'd wager a lot of negative press the aircraft gets is pushed by adversaries who are scared to fight it.

madengr2• 7 years ago

“Lockheed Martin plans to implement a software fix for the flight control system.”

Now where have we heard that before. Software patches to fix inherently unstable hardware. Move fast and break shit.

colechristensen4• 7 years ago

F-35 and all fighter jets all use and must use by design synthetic stability, without computer control the airframe would be impossible to pilot. You need this aerodynamic instability to be maneuverable. If you don't have it turning is very slow. Flight characteristics are very much dependent on software. It isn't a glitch or a "move fast break shit" but a fundamental design feature of fast maneuverable planes.

madengr2• 7 years ago

How does an F-14 and others of the same vintage fly? Isn't that all hydraulic servos? Not trying to be an ass, just curious.

metaphor• 7 years ago

Move fast and break shit.

Ironically, also a core fighter pilot mantra to the detriment of flightline maintainers and field support engineers alike...you might call it a symbiotic relationship.

stevenjohns3• 7 years ago

I'm really of the belief, based purely on imagination, that a lot of the spending and research went into being able to make the F-35 autonomous with a switch.

Drone warfare really is the next step and having full jets that appear to be piloted but are actually completely autonomous would put the US ahead by decades.

tlb• 7 years ago

Starting with a manned aircraft is a terrible way to build an unmanned one. A good fraction of the weight is there to provide life support and safety for the pilot. The canopy is a huge compromise between aerodynamics and visibility. And for manned aircraft, it's worth spending 10x more to get a slightly lower failure rate, because pilots are so valuable. For unmanned aircraft, the reliability calculations are all different.

stevenjohns3• 7 years ago

But it gives access to thousands of hours of training data for that particular aircraft across a range of different situations, and it allows you to test that ML model in real situations.

Moving to something lighter or more aerodynamic becomes a lot easier after that. If you look at the Boeing Airpower/Loyal Wingman UAV, it looks like its based on this concept quite closely.

r00fus2• 7 years ago

I’d like to question that premise. Why is having a full sized, expensive aircraft remote controlled be “decades ahead”?

stevenjohns3• 7 years ago

It doesn't force others to enter into a public arms race with you. It's something you can do completely under the radar indefinitely. Of course the per unit cost of aircrafts will go down when you don't need to account for the safety features, and performance will go up dramatically, and the enemy will never know that there is nobody in the cockpit.

mrep2• 7 years ago

I highly doubt that. A fully autonomous air force would make your entire air force susceptible to hacking and thus your enemy could turn your entire fleet back against you with a single hack. That is an insanely huge risk.

As for remotely controlled drones, that suffers from jamming.

aswanson• 7 years ago

I worked in defense contracting early in my career. White-collar welfare. Disgusting level of waste.

vegetablepotpie2• 7 years ago

I work at a defense contractor. One of the guys in my row of cubicles has his wall plastered with political cartoons mocking welfare, social programs and anyone who thinks the government has a role to play in reducing poverty.

Every-time I pass this gentleman's desk, I see him playing solitaire on this computer. Defense contractors are adult daycare.

gonational4• 7 years ago

Think of the irony here.

Government is the one funding this guy’s adventures in Solitaire. What makes you think Government can do anything efficiently, let alone reduce poverty?

nwrk• 7 years ago

a so-called "green-glow" night vision

Go to 28:30 (actual flight helmet recording) https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B30EHgj_ikFIOTlEeGh6UHFPOTQ...

”Use the force, Luke.”

retSava• 7 years ago

Better link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faxuDFHJ3NY&t=28m30s

(the google drive never loaded for me)

eloff2• 7 years ago

This is a terrible project for many reasons. The insane cost, a plane trying to be everything but master of none, and the whole concept of human piloted planes is so antiquated.

Air craft carriers are obsolete, the same way the carrier made the battleship obsolete in the second World War, but nations were slow to realize it. Missiles make the carrier obsolete today. If you look at China's fast missile boats, they know this already. However it's quite handy still for projecting air power against much weaker foes - which to be fair is what the USA does today.

Human planes are just silly though. Make drones, work on improving the ability to control then accurately remotely. They can out fly and out manoeuvre piloted planes at a fraction of the cost without risking the pilot's lives.

GVIrish8• 7 years ago

The big risk I see with drones is that with aggressive jamming and cyber attacks your drone fleet could ostensibly be crippled. But as you said a drone could easily turn harder than any manned aircraft could, loiter/patrol for far longer, and have a much smaller radar cross section since it wouldn't have to accommodate a cockpit. Sooner or later unmanned combat aircraft will dominate.

I also agree that the aircraft carrier will be supplanted at some point because of sophisticated anti ship missiles. But, if carriers can launch drones from much greater distances it will allow carriers to extend their usefulness for quite some time.

eloff2• 7 years ago

I think lots of smaller done carriers make way more sense than supercarriers when all it takes is one missile to sink them. Drones don't have the same runway requirements.

Jamming remotely piloted drones is a good point. A backup autonomous system can help there. But I don't understand enough about how easy it is to jam signals designed to work through jamming would be.

mrep2• 7 years ago

What do you do when your drone fleet gets jammed so you cannot communicate with them, or worse, they get hacked and the entire fleet gets turned back on you?

segmondy• 7 years ago

Has there every been a USA military aircraft built in the last 20 yrs that didn't have damning reports, tons of waste and over budget issues?

gonational4• 7 years ago

The F-35 has been in development for 27 of those last 20 years.

DuskStar11• 7 years ago

Probably, but we have no idea what it is. (We might find out in 20 years, though - I'd expect a pocket force of stealth UCAVs)

The US's 'black' planes have been remarkably successful, though that might be due to the fact that we never see their development and testing phase.

lotsofpulp• 7 years ago

There’s a few more zeroes in this one, it’s not even comparable.

onepointsixC4• 7 years ago

It's been like this for a long time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkrtxDdaWuM

p1esk3• 7 years ago

What is the main problem with developing a remotely controlled fighter jet? Is it signal jamming? If so, why not make it autonomous? After all, we are actively developing self driving cars...

apoorvkumar• 7 years ago

We already have a fairly good auto pilot. The complexity lies in rules of engagement.

p1esk3• 7 years ago

Can you give an example of such complexity?

johngalt• 7 years ago

The optimal design for a 'jet fighter without a pilot' rapidly converges on a missile.

DuskStar11• 7 years ago

Does it though? I suppose it heavily depends on your definition of "fighter", but cranked-kite and flying wing designs have been the go-to for subsonic stealth jets and UCAVs. Under a "something that is intended to kill other planes" definition a subsonic stealth air-to-air platform with good sensors might qualify as a fighter, but many people seem to think "fast, hypermaneuverable" are requirements too. Confusing the goal with the method, IMO.

Another major design constraint difference between "unmanned fighter" and "cruise missile" would be the deployment and reusability goals. Cruise missiles tend to need to fit in launch tubes or under wings, while presumably an unmanned fighter would not be so constrained (and thus be able to use larger wings). And while cruise missiles are very single use, the sensors on an unmanned fighter may make it too expensive to discard that way.

tlear3• 7 years ago

Jamming, hacking, possibility of being exploited(thing adversarial ML) etc etc

If we get real self driving cars how long till someone figures what you need to plaster on a tree to fool ML into crashing a car :) now imagine full nation state behind such effort. The risk of not having human in the loop is just too great.

You also just can’t do anything limited. I mean you can have even now fighter jet just kill anything it finds that does not transmit id, good in war maybe not so good at other times. Aegis is old tech and it is automated to kill anything that looks like a missile in full auto mode.

Iron dome probably same thing, engages and fires on full auto. Now imagine you hook it up to some automated 155mm battery, the moment missile get painted, it would start counter battery, I am guessing the round would land in Gaza before the rocket hits Israel. Now how many people would be ok with this is another question.

p1esk3• 7 years ago

I wonder if the jamming problem could be solved by having a satellite relay communication to the jet via a laser beam, assuming the receiver on the jet can be tracked precisely. Perhaps also having redundant communication relay links from nearby jets. That would be harder to jam, right? Adversarial attacks could happen, but given enough diversity in sensors and algorithms I think it could be made reasonably robust.

I mean, the benefits of a pilotless fighter jet are pretty significant: more maneuverable, faster, easier to design, and probably cheaper. I'm especially curious about fighter pilots' opinions about this.

gravy• 7 years ago

Reminds me of https://youtu.be/4xJBvKJht78 (The F-18: Just how good is it? (1980))

AlexCoventry3• 7 years ago

Cute that they were worried back then about an expenditure of $4B.

onepointsixC4• 7 years ago

Just to add to your video there is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkrtxDdaWuM (F-16, Sale of the Century).

Causality1• 7 years ago

Cost+ needs to die. Contractors should be forced to either meet their original bid or go bankrupt trying.

burfog3• 7 years ago

Disaster possibility 1 is that nobody bids on the project. It is too risky.

Disaster possibility 2 is that the original bid is met... but one critical feature is left out of the contract (overlooked) and is thus not in the result.

Disaster possibility 3 is that the company does go bankrupt. Uh, oops, we needed that company. Now we can't get parts for other products. This could be fixed via a huge bailout.

amitport• 7 years ago

So the companies would go bankrupt and the project would remain unfinished

pas6• 7 years ago

This is a problem that cannot be solved by hard and fast rules.

There needs to be a decision making process that can guide the R&D project.

Unless of course goals, progress, etc. can somehow be quantified. (But these are complex projects, complex goals, even coming up with relevant metrics is hard, and somehow coming up with one utility function is kind of impossible - without spending a lot of money on R&D for that, but then you're back to square one.)

That said, yes, risk should be better spread, but also the following are all critically related to public spending/procurement: Personal accountability and motivation, too big to fail, cartel/oligopoly, agent-principal problems, corruption, institutional deadlock, too much bureaucracy, bad responsibility-authority allocation, etc.

floriferous• 7 years ago

Why do so many people on hackernews appear to really know their stuff when it comes to aeronautics?

Between the F-35, the ethiopian crash, and plenty other related topics, I’m amazed at the quantity and quality of the comments.

I would expect this topic to be kind of niche, and not attract >100 comments everytime!

stunt• 7 years ago

I’m amazed at the quantity and quality of the comments.

How do you measure the quality if you are not an expert?

Surely many are an enthusiast in aeronautics. There are plenty of documentaries and incredibly lots of information on the internet about aeronautics. And I believe that's still just some shallow information.

colordrops• 7 years ago

Lots of software people work in aerospace and military.

A2017U1• 7 years ago

Relatively?

Find that hard to believe.

divbyzer0• 7 years ago

Perhaps the perceived shortcomings appear to be obvious to even the non-aeronautically trained?

I recall the MCAS issue being discussed here well before governments grounded the 737max. The FAA being one of the last to ground.

The F-35 issues appear to share those common in engineering. Over promising, over spending and not able to deliver on those promises, because no solution can satisfy all wants/requirements.

In my explicitly unqualified view, the F-35 tries to be everything to all services, yet my limited understanding on aeronautics is (similar to marine engineering); is the best designs are those that focus on a specific task.

pas6• 7 years ago

To alter the picture a bit and complicate a lot more:

it's of course possible to make a new jet fighter/bomber/thing that satisfies all of the requirements. The issue is cost and time.

The F35 is a classic mega-R&D project. Like going to the Moon, fusion, self-driving cars, XUV litography [or the whole process/node change from 10nm to 7 or 5nm]. Costs are enormous, lifetime TCO is also very high. It's so complex and funding is so far from infinite, that it is and will be never "done".

We know these. Just as you can always tweak a nuclear reactor or atomic bomb design, just as you can always make better microchips, you can always make better jets.

It's also very similar to the JWST (James Webb Space Telescope) - the goal/design is pretty straightforward, just the engineering way to get there, is not. It calls for "tech" that's simply does not exist, and calls for systems integration of that tech on a level that simply cannot be adequately estimated/planned.

Fusion, the JWST and the F-35 have different principal constraints (the JWST seems the simplest, it is simply cost constrained - every part of the R&D/assembly/verification process seems so underfunded that all the other parts/participants have to wait for each other - and downtime is not cheap either, specialists can't just go and have a gig while they wait for others/testing/manufacturing; the F-35 is probably very bureaucratically constrained, a bit like ITER [the big international fusion project] - everyone has a small part in it, so there's is lots and lots and even more back and forth between everybody, problems are discovered, tweaking needs discussions, discussions with many parties are a nightmare, everything needs paperwork, because it's public money after all, etc.)

This does not make the F35 "bad", but of course begs the question of spending efficacy. Was there really no better way to spend all this money and achieve very similar goals? There probably was.

But. Usually these projects are a success even if the end result is useless. Because they fund R&D in many places.

For example a good overview of how mega-R&D translates into tangible innovations is the W7X brochure: https://www.ipp.mpg.de/987655/w7x_and_industry_en.pdf (Germany spent a few hundred millions euros, and most of that went to small shops iterating on their tech - which of course helps Germany remain competitive on the global markets).

Gibbon12• 7 years ago

I'm not remembering all the details (I think the F-102). They tried an all service fighter back in the 1950's and the Navy eventually put their foot down. My impression has been the F35 is spork with wings.

ionised• 7 years ago

Are you sure it's not just a case of armchair engineering as in the case of armchair psychology?

Lots of HN comments pretend to know everything about depression and its cures despite posting totally incorrect information on the subject.

People here tend to speak with authority on many things they actually know next to nothing about.

biztos• 7 years ago

I've asked myself this too, and it occurred to me that there are a fair number of people on HN who are "older" (even older than me!) and Defense/Aerospace were pretty common places for techies to work in, say, the 80's. Often the only game in town.

That, and I think tons of tech-oriented people love flying machines, and a good exit or a fat Google salary makes it much more realistic to exercise that passion in real life.

csomar• 7 years ago

The HN audience is very big. So having 20-30 who are specialized in very niche domain becomes quite probable. Unlike Reddit, HN gets moderated heavily for useless and troll comments. The noise is reduced.

theoh• 7 years ago

Aeronautics is (still) an incredibly glamorous field, and fighter jets and aviation disasters are a stereotypical topic of fascination for male engineers. HN is all about the "cool", charismatic side of engineering, and it doesn't get much cooler than critiquing warplanes and analysing air disasters.

Geeking out about this kind of topic is routine for people with an interest in engineering. And let's be clear: it really is just a matter of geeking out, people getting a thrill out of playing at "appearing to really know their stuff".

whenchamenia2• 7 years ago

Sadly, most of the 'informed' comments here are anything but. 60% seem to just wanna trash on the military, 20% took a flight on a cessna once and think theyre pilots, 10% knew a guy in the 'defense industry' and 10% are bleating their political opinion, poorly dressed in technical garb. Take it all with a gargantuan pile of salt.

gdy4• 7 years ago

"appear to really know their stuff when it comes to aeronautics"

Are they? How do you know that?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

rtkwe• 7 years ago

There's been a decade of smart (at least seeming) people complaining about how badly conceived and pointing out the various issues with the plane are. So at this point distinguishing between people who have the experience to know what they're saying and people who have read a lot about the F-35 program is going to be a bit tough in a vacuum.

robin_reala• 7 years ago

“The F-35’s logistics system currently has no way for foreign F-35 operators to keep their secret data from being sent to the United States.”

Wow.

supergirl• 7 years ago

countries that buy f35 don't really have secrets from the US anyway

picklepete• 7 years ago

I hope you’re joking.

gdy4• 7 years ago

That's why the NSA has been spying on the allies, right?

yc-kraln• 7 years ago

Could this be related to the fatal crash of the F-35 in Japan?

OliverJones• 7 years ago

It's a counterfactual speculation now, but what would have happened if there were two airplane projects, one designed for vertical takeoff and landing, and another for more general use?

What if airplanes had to be cranked out at a rate like the WWII Merchant Marine Liberty Ships: 2,700 of them from 1941-1945? (There's a restored one, SS Jeremiah O'Brien, at pier 45 in San Francisco.)

Are these machines so complex now that it necessarily must take a generation to develop a new one?

cantrevealname• 7 years ago

The 13 deficiencies include: The F-35’s logistics system currently has no way for foreign F-35 operators to keep their secret data from being sent to the United States.

I marvel at how foreign buyers of something as complex as stealth aircraft can have any confidence that the system is not riddled with back doors, remote control capability, "phoning home", surveillance, and kill switches. How would you prove to a foreign buyer that your F-35 would not:

- upload all your secret flight data to a tire pressure monitor every time a maintenance worker checks the tires with the special gauge he has to use, which then retransmits the data when the gauge is put back in the hanger, without needing any cooperation from the maintenance worker

- cause all your F-35s to fall out of sky everywhere in the world when the GPS satellites transmit an extra 64-bit coded message that cause fuel actuators to shut off

- put your F-35 under remote control when a coded microwave message is transmitted directly to the plane during combat or a close encounter

Even children's toys and home appliances are routinely discovered to be phoning home and doing sneaky unexpected things. I'm going to hazard a guess that all large weapons systems are compromised —— perhaps by more than one nation simultaneously since parts and expertise come from hundreds of contractors and many different countries. I'm not aware of any revelations of weapon-system backdoors yet, but we might hear about some of them in the aftermath of the next major war.

emiliobumachar• 7 years ago

Back in 1982's Falklands war, the Argentines sunk two British destroyers with French-made Exocet surface missiles, towards the beginning, and then stopped scoring any hits.

I once heard unsourced speculation that the French might have given the British the scoop on how to sabotage incoming missiles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falklands_War

tyingq• 7 years ago

It seems they only had 5 total of the Exocets to fire.

One hit the HMS Sheffield, two hit the merchant ship Atlantic Conveyor, and one hit the destroyer HMS Glamorgan. So that's 4 of the 5.

I think they just ran out of missiles.

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17256975

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exocet#The_Falklands_War

smackay• 7 years ago

I have a vague memory that there were also problems with the Sea Wolf based defence system on the ships. The controlling software apparently recognised the incoming Exocets as friendly. I don't know if there is any credibility to this but I am sure it would have been fixed pretty rapidly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Wolf_(missile)

trhway• 7 years ago

I once heard unsourced speculation that the French might have given the British the scoop on how to sabotage incoming missiles.

reminded by association - in the new Russian&Serbian movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Balkan_Line released for the 20th anniversary of the war there is a scene with the French bomb dropped on a house in Serbia and which didn't explode because it was intentionally sabotaged. Doesn’t seem to have propaganda value, and I’m wondering whether it is a play on real facts or just an artistic reference to the French resistance to the NATO bombing of civilian targets.

EliRivers• 7 years ago

From another perspective, creating yourself a brand new weapon system that is designed to be vulnerable to remote attacks, data theft, falling out of the sky on demand, and so on, seems like making yourself really, really vulnerable.

manfredo2• 7 years ago

And not to mention, likely unnecessary. Even just cutting a foreign nation off from spare parts and maintenance crews is enough to ground planes, as Iran discovered in the Iran-Iraq war.

xysg• 7 years ago

the F-35 is only supposed to be sold to close allies anyway so I doubt secrecy from the US is on the top of buyers' minds? conversely, they'd likely engage in joint exercises with the US.

xiphias22• 7 years ago

What does close ally mean?

Germany was supposed to be a closed ally, but Merkel wasn't that happy when she realized that the USA is spying on her.

It looks like the governments are starting to be less friendly towards eachother as the currencies in the world are collapsing.

jpambrun• 7 years ago

The US already in an economic dispute with many allies (including Canada) citing national security threats. At this rate, the US might have no close allies left by the end of life of the F35s.

Josh379• 7 years ago

Of course the US has backdoors. What they are buying is the power to fight US enemies. Not US friends or the US itself.

not_a_cop75• 7 years ago

This is a result of complexity, not the systems themselves. Anything that is complex has vulnerabilities. It might as well be a law of computing.

bdamm2• 7 years ago

It is worth noting that the dominant systems architectures of today help ensure vulnerabilities remain. Doing something about this could become a defining factor of computing in the 21st century.

smacktoward• 7 years ago

The thing is that nobody just buys a weapon in isolation. You buy into a weapons system, which includes not just the weapon itself but a whole universe of concerns that surround it: logistical concerns like spare parts, fuel and ammunition, operational concerns like tactical doctrines that work well with the weapon, and so forth. Without that stuff, the weapon by itself is pretty close to useless.

All of which means that it's more or less impossible to buy a weapon from a foreign power without opening yourself up wide to that power. You have to let their military advisors onto your bases, to train your troops on the doctrines that go with the weapon. You have to let their logistical specialists into your inventory systems, so they can hook you into the pipelines through which the spare parts and ammo flow. Any of these people could be using their access to snoop on you or worse, but there's not much you can do about that because without them all you've bought is a $100 million paperweight.

If you're the buyer, yes, that absolutely sucks. But, unless you're willing to spend vast amounts of money you don't have to build up your own domestic military-industrial complex, you don't have a lot of alternatives. You either buy into one of the existing ecosystems (American, Russian, European or Chinese), or get curb-stomped by a neighbor who did. Once you're bought into one of those ecosystems you're effectively at the mercy of the state that operates it, of course, but hey, you do what you've gotta do. As the saying goes, the strong do what they will, and the weak suffer what they must.

luch• 7 years ago

Yep, nobody buy F-35 planes because it's a superior airplane (it's not) countries buy it in order to have better diplomatic relationships with the USA.

It's pretty telling to see Germany refusing to buy F-35 or Hungary buying ones in order to piss off Sweden.

enraged_camel• 7 years ago

Furthermore, buying weapons doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It is a political process. The US will use its considerable clout to “encourage” other countries to buy arms from the US.

Bartweiss2• 7 years ago

There is at least a partial alternative: you can get involved in the supply chain.

For the F-35, other countries were asked to pay into the R&D budget, with the promise that large contributors could obtain exclusive manufacturing rights to certain components. I've seen a lot of grumbling about this, with people claiming it traded cost savings for a military risk that the planes will be useless (or at least lack spares) if things go wrong for those suppliers.

This is sort of true, but the missing insight is that the dependency is also a goal. It's not going to allay fears that F-35s are calling home with telemetry or have compromised software, but it does help create reciprocal interests in the same way as inviting in a foreign military base.

nexuist• 7 years ago

I find it odd that this is a realistic concern on HN of all places. It's a physical object - and we all know that physical presence means instant own.

How would you prove to a foreign buyer that your F-35 is not backdoored? You wouldn't. You sell them the plane and then they have the best cybersecurity experts the market can provide go into the hangar and completely tear the whole thing apart, inspecting every on board computer, dumping assembly code, inspecting circuit boards, etc. These are being bought by nation states, not Grandma who doesn't know her router has an admin interface with a default password.

Any attempt to backdoor that gets discovered would be an international incident and severely strain diplomatic relations between the U.S. and all of its allies. At the very least, anyone looking for nextgen fighters now would look somewhere else now knowing that we have no qualms with screwing with their defenses.

stcredzero3• 7 years ago

It's a physical object - and we all know that physical presence means instant own.

It's more like eventual own, depending on your time frame. If someone wants to to to lengths to physically secure something, it can probably withstand 1 seconds of intrusion time. It has closer to zero chance of withstanding 36000 seconds, and very close to zero chance of withstanding 360000 seconds.

stcredzero3• 7 years ago

- cause all your F-35s to fall out of sky everywhere in the world when the GPS satellites transmit an extra 64-bit coded message that cause fuel actuators to shut off

This is very close to a plot point from Battlestar galactica (2004). I don't know of a way off the top of my head to detect back doors other than manually reviewing code.

A large company which has a database of many back doors might be able to train an AI to find them. I'm going to guess that someone, somewhere is trying to do this, somehow.

gkanai• 7 years ago

Japan recently lost one of their first F35s and the pilot. One wonders whether one of these problems was the cause of the loss of the airplane and the pilot, not pilot error.

greedo8• 7 years ago

The most recent report shows that the pilot lost spatial awareness.

blunte3• 7 years ago

For the trillion(s) that have gone into this fighter, one could wonder if there were other better uses of that money.

Even if defense is a necessary evil, it should be obvious by now that electronic (cyber - forgive me) warfare is the future of military.

Why attack with physical weapons when you can literally shut down the power to an entire country? Or jam its communications en masse. Or cripple its transportation infrastructure.

DanielBMarkham2• 7 years ago

There is no "future of warfare" in terms of just being one thing.

When guns came out, they said it would be the end of warfare. Instead of spending years training archers, you could pull farmers from the fields, put together huge armies almost overnight. When machine guns came out, it was the end of warfare. How could massed formations fight against so many rounds going downrange at the same time?

This continued on with aircraft, aircraft carriers, nuclear weapons, missiles, and so forth. Nuclear weapons are especially interesting because instead of eliminating war, it looks like they eliminated formal war, pushing all that conflict down into police actions and non-state actors.

All those other things stuck around. What became really tough is that you had to integrate all of those other things together so that you use that right tools in the right way, almost like putting together a symphony. Cyber is the same way. What we're seeing now -- and I'm a firm believer we are currently in a cyber war -- are a lot of different actors seeing how hard they can push things. It's a war without any conventions about what "fighting fair" means. Bad place for us to be.

I think the F-35 has been a giant disaster, but that's part of a different discussion about military priorities versus strategic planning.

blunte3• 7 years ago

But I think you need to take a step back and ask what the point of a military is.

If the point were actually about defending one's country, then there are surely more effective ways to spend the money.

By all appearances, the modern military is just a convoluted way to funnel public money into the pockets of a few contractors and corporations (whose investors and shareholders win). It's an immensely inefficient way to skim money from the general population.

One might say the modern military is more precise, suggesting that we care about avoiding civilian casualties. However, the US drone use blows that theory.

If the goal were to defend a country from terrorists (modern invaders), then we would be concerned with right wing extremism which is responsible for more deaths than foreign "terrorists".

Lastly, if we were just concerned with human lives and longer lifespans, we would be putting most of our money into combating heart disease.

moftz• 7 years ago

Because you don't need much in resources to run a command center on diesel generators that can scramble some Russian surplus jets from the 1970s to start bombing runs on your carrier group. Electronic warfare is the next edge on the battlefield but you still need traditional weapons. There is a certain advantage to not have cutting edge tech in every facet of your society, how are you going to hack the power utility when they are still running the same equipment from the 50s?

blunte3• 7 years ago

You don't need a broken trillion dollar jet to combat 1970s jets. Our F16s would do that job nicely, even if the maintenance cost is high (but nothing on the scale of what the F35 costs to even operate).

You can disrupt 50s utility equipment with radio/em. You don't need a trillion dollar jet for that.

I'm just saying that we're spending money on the wrong stuff. And we're doing it in a HUGE way. There's a reason we do that, and it's not because of defense concerns...

S_A_P• 7 years ago

Its funny how I hear that a lot of UFO activity is really just "secret defense projects" that are not available yet, like there is some skunk works out there that is building stuff that is light years ahead of the state of the art. Meanwhile when we look at what the defense department is actually doing, they are building a plane that is trying to be all things to all people that defies the laws of physics with the expected results.

AndyMcConachie• 7 years ago

War, war never changes ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBDrv1PY-uU

Dirlewanger• 7 years ago

If there was ever a contender for the most complex _thing_ humanity has ever made, I think DoD bureaucracy is a strong favorite.

SEJeff2• 7 years ago

Counterpoint: http://www.airforcemag.com/Features/Pages/2019/June%202019/L...

KONAir• 7 years ago

F-35 project is infinitely more valuable as its contuined production provides A LOT of employment and contracts. I sincerely don't expect the project ever end or deliver anything worthwhile.

The Pentagon is battling the clock to fix serious, unreported F-35 problems

Related Stories